Nagpur’s New Flyovers Expose Cracks in Quality and Accountability

thenewsdirt
Oct 9
11 min read

In June this year, residents of Nagpur, the largest city in Vidarbha, watched in disbelief as a portion of a newly built flyover caved in before it could even be inaugurated.

The incident occurred on a ₹65 crore overbridge in the Kamptee area, where heavy monsoon rain opened up a gaping crater on the flyover’s deck days ahead of the ribbon-cutting.

A video of the collapsed stretch went viral, sparking public outrage and immediate questions about how a brand-new infrastructure project could literally crumble overnight. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case.

Over the past three years, Nagpur’s ambitious spree of flyover construction has been marred by structural failures, design blunders, and a troubling lack of accountability from authorities, shaking public confidence in what was supposed to be a showcase of urban development.

Structural Failures Raise Quality Concerns

Nagpur has earned the nickname “City of Flyovers” in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, reflecting local pride in its growing network of overpasses.

Yet, project after project, serious defects emerge as soon as these structures are built. The Kamptee flyover cave-in is one glaring example. The 500-metre bridge had been under construction since 2020 and was nearly complete when the road on top collapsed into a sinkhole.

Locals looked on aghast as contractors rushed to do midnight patchwork on a flyover that hadn’t even opened to traffic, and openly blamed “poor quality work and corruption” for the fiasco.

The state public works department (PWD) official in charge ordered the builder to submit a report and repair the damage, but there was no announcement of any independent audit or penalties. The incident raised red flags about not only the quality of construction but also the level of supervision and accountability on high-value public projects.

It was not the first time a new Nagpur flyover quite literally fell apart. On the city’s eastern flank, the five-armed Pardi flyover, dubbed the “Khekda (crab) Flyover” for its shape, suffered a major collapse during its construction.

In October 2021, one span of this bridge came crashing down, fortunately, before the route was open to the public.

That project, initially budgeted at ₹448 crore, was delayed by years of design changes and cost escalations to over ₹600 crore. By the time the Pardi flyover’s first sections finally opened in late 2023, it had been nearly a decade in the making.

On the very next day of opening one section in February 2025, a large chunk of loose concrete from the flyover fell onto a car passing below, completely wrecking the vehicle. More recently, in August, commuters noticed wide gaps emerging between some segments of the Pardi flyover, exposing the road below. National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) officials tried to reassure the public that these were just missing rubber seals and “no cause for alarm”.

Many residents remained unconvinced. “Since the flyover opened, one issue or another keeps arising. It already took a decade to complete, and now these things are happening, raising serious questions about the quality of the work,” said one regular commuter, voicing a common concern.

Several other new overpasses have shown distressing early signs of structural weakness. The Mankapur flyover on National Highway 47, built in 2014 as part of a flagship corridor, has developed cracks not once but twice in its short lifespan. In May this year, a long fissure opened up on one side of the Mankapur overpass, forcing authorities to shut down an entire carriageway and divert traffic.

Repairs dragged on for months, turning the busy route into a bottleneck of two-way traffic on a single lane. NHAI engineers eventually decided that the strength of one span was compromised and undertook the replacement of three spans of the bridge.

By September, the flyover was still partially closed, well past the initial 100-day repair deadline. Local frustration boiled over when a minor accident occurred on the crowded single-lane section.

Angry citizens and political workers even staged a protest on the flyover itself, sitting down on the roadway to demand faster action. “We’ve seen small accidents now and then since the work started, but this kind of incident was unexpected and bound to happen,” said one resident, blaming the authorities for protracting the fix and failing to enforce safety measures during repairs.

Notably, the contractor responsible for Mankapur is obliged to maintain the structure until 2032 under a long-term contract, yet neither the company nor officials have faced public consequences for the lapse, underscoring a pattern of inaction even when defects surface.

Design Flaws and Planning Oversights

Beyond physical construction quality, Nagpur’s flurry of new flyovers has been plagued by basic design and planning mistakes that have ended up defeating their purpose. The 3.9 km Sadar flyover, opened in early 2020 with great fanfare and ₹219 crore of investment, was meant to streamline traffic through a congested heart of the city. Instead, its poorly thought-out landing near a major intersection created a new choke-point.

Within weeks of opening, authorities had to shut down a connecting road at Samvidhan Square because cars coming off the flyover were immediately hitting a narrow stretch and causing jams.

Union minister Nitin Gadkari, who hails from Nagpur, publicly acknowledged in mid-2025 that the Sadar flyover’s landing was a “faulty design” and announced a ₹34 crore plan to modify it. Yet over a month after that announcement, no agency had even been formally assigned the task of fixing it. Confusion reigned as NHAI, the state PWD, and Nagpur Metro rail authorities passed the responsibility around.

Eventually, officials indicated that the Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation (MahaMetro) would take up the corrective work, but as of this writing, the agency was “still awaiting” a contract to begin construction. In the meantime, thousands of commuters continue to detour through side streets every day, bearing the brunt of the flyover’s design mistake while bureaucracies dither over its repair.

A similarly troubling case is the new flyover extension at Kawrapeth railway crossing, opened late last year. This ₹141 crore project was intended to connect two existing flyovers and eliminate long waits at multiple railway gates on the city’s eastern side.

But due to a bizarre layout, the extension ended up as a T-shaped overpass with no proper exit of its own, essentially meeting another flyover at a T-junction in mid-air. Traffic authorities were so concerned that they initially refused to open the stretch after a safety audit found the design to be dangerous.

The flyover had no dedicated landing, lacked U-turn provisions, and funnelled high-speed vehicles into a short merge with an existing road. Under pressure from local politicians and residents tired of waiting, the extension was eventually opened to the public without all the recommended fixes.

Almost immediately, it became a hotspot for wrong-way driving and chaotic U-turns. Vehicles would speed up the ramp and then encounter an abrupt T-intersection, leading many confused drivers to cut across lanes or attempt risky turns. “This extension is completely unnecessary and has only made commuting more dangerous,” said Ranjan Adhikari, a resident of the area, criticising the PWD’s planning.

In one spot on the flyover, concrete barricades still block two unopened arms that were supposed to connect seamlessly to another route, a sign of last-minute design changes. Traffic police officials admit that the absence of proper signage, lane markings and dividers on the elevated road turned it into a free-for-all during peak hours. They have since requested the PWD to install a continuous median divider and better markings, but those measures “will take five to six months” to materialise, according to engineers. Even elected leaders have taken note.

North Nagpur MLA Nitin Raut raised the Kawrapeth flyover’s flaws in the state assembly, pointing out that a Y-shaped design was originally needed instead of the problematic T-junction. In response, the state’s PWD minister conceded to additional works, approving a ₹20.84 crore plan to widen junctions and improve safety on that stretch. As of now, however, commuters are still navigating the flawed flyover daily as they wait for those promises to translate into action on the ground.

Questions have also been raised by a recent viral video showing an under-construction flyover beam practically slicing through the balcony of a residential building in Nagpur. The structure in question is part of the massive Indor, Dighori elevated corridor, a ₹998 crore project connecting the city’s northern and eastern parts. At Ashok Square, one segment of the new flyover passes so close to a three-storey building that it appears to cut into the corner of the top-floor balcony.

Urban planners were left shaking their heads at the obvious encroachment on residential space, while netizens dubbed it an “engineering marvel” in jest. When the footage spread online, NHAI officials insisted the balcony itself was an illegal extension that had encroached on government land. Within days, the municipal corporation sent in demolition crews to break the offending balcony slab.

Still, for many observers, this bizarre episode highlights a lack of due diligence in route planning, either the flyover’s alignment was drawn up without a proper survey of existing structures, or enforcement against the building encroachment came far too late. In either case, it has added another embarrassing footnote to Nagpur’s infrastructure drive.

Experts say many of these problems could have been avoided with better planning and technical oversight from the start.

Transportation engineers from the city’s Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT) note that agencies often embark on flyover projects without comprehensive traffic studies or input from qualified designers. “The government agencies do not consult experts while designing these projects. They have preconceived notions about building a road or flyover if they see traffic congestion at a spot,” observed Udit Jain, assistant professor of transport engineering at VNIT. Key principles like proper geometric design and factoring in future traffic flow are sometimes overlooked in the haste to sanction projects.

Basic errors, such as abruptly narrowing a flyover’s width at the exit, or failing to provide drainage, surface only after construction, when they are costlier to fix.

VNIT faculty say they are typically called in only “after faults surface,” rather than at the design stage, when their input could prevent such issues. With multiple agencies (NMC, NIT, PWD, NHAI, MahaRail and others) all handling different pieces of Nagpur’s infrastructure boom, coordination has been another casualty. “Many times even faulty designs are approved,” a senior PWD official admitted, attributing it to weak oversight and lack of communication among departments. The result is that projects touted as solutions for traffic woes have, in practic,e created new problems through avoidable design lapses.

Official Inaction and Public Outcry

Despite these recurring troubles, there is a sense among citizens that authorities respond only under pressure, and even then, the follow-through is minimal. In case after case, the pattern has been reactive fixes rather than proactive accountability.

When the Kamptee flyover collapsed in the rains, officials from the state PWD quickly had the contractor cover the crater with temporary filling and claimed a full repair would follow.

However, there was no public talk of blacklisting the builder or conducting a quality audit by an independent expert. The matter largely died down after a few news cycles, even as residents openly questioned if corruption and corner-cutting were to blame. “This bridge was under construction for five years, and it collapsed before opening… If this is the condition now, what can we expect after it opens? This clearly reflects poor quality work and corruption,” one exasperated local had remarked at the scene. It’s a damning perception for any public project, yet concrete punitive action remains elusive.

Likewise, the faulty Sadar flyover design was an open secret for over a year, inconveniencing thousands, before a high-profile intervention finally spurred plans for a fix. Even after the responsible minister announced a remedy, the bureaucratic inertia between agencies meant no one took charge for weeks. It fell to media reports and public complaints to keep the issue alive. “The lack of clarity and delay… has raised questions over coordination among government agencies. Meanwhile, thousands of daily commuters continue to bear the brunt of a flawed design awaiting a long-overdue fix,” The Times of India noted pointedly in an article on the Sadar flyover logjam. \

A similar dynamic played out with the Kawrapeth flyover extension: only after traffic police and irate motorists highlighted the dangers did political leaders step in. Even then, the promised structural modifications are slow to arrive, and residents are left navigating an unsafe setup in the interim. “If no department is taking its responsibility seriously, then such incidents are bound to happen,” warned one commuter during the Mankapur flyover protest, lamenting the lack of traffic management at the repair site.

Public anger has undeniably been mounting. Nagpur’s citizens, known for being supportive of development initiatives, are increasingly vocal that development means little if it compromises safety and efficiency.

Local media have run critical pieces with headlines like “City of Flyovers or City of Delays?” questioning the slow pace and execution of these big-ticket projects. Social media in the region is replete with sarcasm, photos of the “flyover inside a balcony” drew nationwide chuckles at Nagpur’s expense, and the Kamptee cave-in was seized upon by opposition figures as symptomatic of deeper rot in public works. Some activists have called for third-party quality inspections of all ongoing flyover constructions, while others demand that officials be held personally accountable for lapses. So far, the official response has been limited to assurances that problems will be addressed.

For example, after the balcony incident, NHAI swiftly coordinated with the city corporation to demolish the protruding structure, emphasising that the flyover itself was not at fault. And when questions were raised in the state legislature, ministers did announce remedial budgets as noted. Yet on the ground, tangible action, such as rapid repairs, stringent contractor penalties, or fundamental design revisions, has barely kept pace with the rate at which new issues are uncovered.

For Nagpur’s commuters, the daily reality is that each new flyover is a double-edged sword. The city’s expanding web of concrete bridges was meant to uncoil traffic snarls and herald modern mobility. Instead, unfinished construction, sudden detours, and hastily patched-up faults have become part of the commute.

Many drivers now approach the newest flyovers with caution, aware that a smooth ride is not guaranteed. “Development delayed is development denied,” a local newspaper commentary observed, capturing the public’s mix of hope and frustration. There is no opposition to progress in Nagpur, on the contrary, residents welcome infrastructure improvements, but they are demanding that the government deliver on its promises with structures that are safe, sound, and completed on time.

In the absence of that accountability, Nagpur’s proud title of “City of Flyovers” risks becoming an ironic reminder of unmet expectations rather than a symbol of triumph.

As things stand, Nagpur’s grand infrastructure drive is at a crossroads. The city’s new flyovers were supposed to be the answer to chronic congestion, yet they have introduced new challenges due to shoddy execution and slow corrective action.

Each headline-making lapse, a collapsed span, a cracked pillar, a flawed traffic flow, chips away at public trust.

The onus now lies with the authorities to not only patch up these mistakes but also learn from them. Nagpurians navigating the daily maze of barricades and bumpy flyovers are watching closely.

They are looking for signs that quality will not be sacrificed for speed, and that when problems emerge, officials will act decisively rather than deflect blame. Until those lessons are absorbed, the drive under these flyovers will continue to be a test of patience and faith for the very people they were meant to serve.